25th Annual Conference
Towards a Spiritual Civilization

The historic completion of the buildings and terraces of the Arc Projects on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land has been identified by Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, as marking the “culmination of the development” of the Bahá’í Administrative Order. He indicated that this “vast and irresistible process,” unprecedented in humanity’s spiritual history, would synchronize with two other significant developments—one outside and one within the Bahá’í world—”the establishment of the Lesser Peace and the evolution of Bahá’í national and local institutions.” He further stated that this process will eventually lead to the attainment of the Most Great Peace and the “emergence, in the plenitude of its power and glory, of the focal Center of the agencies constituting the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh,” and ultimately to “the flowering of a civilization, divinely inspired, unique in its features, world-embracing in its scope, and fundamentally spiritual in its character. . . .”

 Of the edifices of the Arc on Mount Carmel, the Universal House of Justice has written: “When the buildings are completed, they will stand as the visible seat of mighty institutions whose purpose is no other than the spiritualization of humanity and the preservation of justice and unity throughout the world.” Moreover, “The beauty and magnificence of the Gardens and Terraces now under development are symbolic of the nature of the transformation which is destined to occur both within the hearts of the world's peoples and in the physical environment of the planet.”

 To mark this historic event in 2001, the Annual Conference of the Association for Bahá’í Studies–North America will explore aspects and implications of these processes and our role within them, including the textual basis of these processes in the Bahá’í Writings; the Lesser Peace as a prelude to the Most Great Peace; the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh as the matrix of the spiritual civilization of the future; the evolution of Bahá’í Administrative institutions; the nature and character of a spiritual civilization and its implications for all aspects of society; the Mount Carmel projects and their significance in the transformation both of human relationships—individual and collective, and of human environments—physical and social; the role and contribution of Native peoples in relation to the concept of “spiritual civilization”; the role of women and the process of establishing the equality of women and men; and the role of scholarship and Bahá’í Studies in representing, explaining, participating in, and advancing these processes. Presenters from every field, discipline, and profession are invited to analyze these topics in relationship to their own area of specialization, to explore their role as contributors to and participants in a spiritual civilization, and to examine the ways in which the Bahá’í teachings illuminate their object of study as well as how knowledge generated in these fields of endeavor can contribute to the understanding and advancement of these processes.